A Rumor of War

by Philip Caputo

  The proud, confident 1st Battalion of the 1st Marines stepped into it in September, and stayed in it until March when the monsoon campaign ended. Then they were moved up to Hue and from Hue to the Demilitarized Zone, to fight harder battles against the North Vietnamese. By that time, they were no longer a fat battalion, but a rather lean one, and their cockiness had diminished in proportion to their losses. In the six-month campaign, the battalion’s total casualties would reach four hundred and seventy-five killed and wounded. More than half of those were patched up and sent out to fight again, some to be wounded again. A little less than two hundred were permanent losses—dead, invalided out, or wounded and hospitalized for long periods. That worked out to eight men a week, an attrition rate almost equal to that suffered by many British battalions—ten a week—on the Western Front in 1915 and early 1916.

  It had become a different war. The casualty rate had increased enough to make death and maiming seem commonplace. In its first two months, between mid-September and mid-November, the battalion took two hundred and forty-nine casualties. Attrition. The attrition the enemy inflicted on us and that which we inflicted on ourselves. The Huey gunship that flew in to give fire support to a company pinned down in ambush and ended up giving fire support to the VC by strafing the marines. The troop-carrying helicopter that went down in a monsoon storm. The armored personnel carrier that was backing away from a mortar barrage and crushed a marine lying in the road. Altogether, I wrote an average of seventy-five or eighty reports a week. It became part of my daily routine, as monotonous as the steadily falling rain; and soon those names meant no more to me than the names in a phone book.

  Except one. On September 18, I was at my desk in the adjutant’s tent. It was a hot afternoon, and I was dripping sweat over the usual paperwork. The EE-8 buzzed. I picked it up. On the other end was Lieutenant Jones, the 1st Battalion adjutant. He did not announce himself as such, but spoke in our boy-scout secret code: “Crowd One? This is Bound One. Is your One Alpha there?”

  “This is One Alpha.”

  “One Alpha, Bound Charley Two’s had two storm ones and three storm twos. Can you copy?” In English, that meant 2d platoon, C Company had suffered two killed and three wounded.

  “Wait one,” I said. I got up and pulled some casualty report forms from the ammo-box file cabinet. Sitting down again, I said, “Okay, go ahead.”

  “I’ll give you the storm ones first.”

  “Roger. Go ahead.”

  The first KIA was a corpsman. He had suffered a GSW, through and through, head.

  “Okay, that’s the first one,” Jones said when he had finished with the corpsman. “Second one’s last name is Levy. Lima-Echo…”

  “Is his first name Walter?”

  “Lima-Echo-Victor-Yankee. Levy.”

  “Bound One, is his first name Walter?” I asked, scrawling L-e-v-y beside the line headed NAME. My hand was shaking slightly and my voice sounded strange.

  “One Alpha, wait one, will you? That’s a roge. First name is Walter. Middle name Neville. November Echo Victor…”

  “I can spell it.”

  “Okay. Rank: first lieutenant. Serial number…” Some static interrupted. “Organization: you’ve got that. Nature of injuries: multiple fragment wounds.…”

  “Aw, goddamnit,” I said, forgetting the rules about using profanity in field communications. Writing down what Jones had just told me, I saw Levy’s darkly handsome face and slow, easy grin. Everyone who knew him remarked on his smile, warm, attractive, all straight white teeth; but there was something vaguely enigmatic about it, as if he were smiling at some secret joke. “Goddamnit. Goddamn all of it.”

  “Did you know this guy?” Jones asked.

  “We went through Quantico together. Yeah, we were pretty tight. I didn’t even know he was in your outfit.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, let’s get this done. Age: twenty-three. Circumstances: while on patrol vicinity of Danang.”

  “Bound One, let’s drop all this roger wilco crap. Just tell me how it happened.”

  He told me as much as he knew. A patrol from the 9th Marines had fallen into an ambush and radioed for reinforcements. Levy’s platoon was sent, but was itself ambushed before it could get to them. Levy was hit by mine shrapnel and knocked down, another marine by rifle fire. The corpsman, while treating the man with the bullet wound, was sniped. Not knowing the corpsman was dead, Levy forced himself up and half crawled, half walked to him. As he tried to pull him out of the line of fire, Levy himself was sniped.

  “You’re sure it’s him?” I asked.

  “Sure we’re sure.”

  “All right. You might as well go ahead.”

  Jones went on: Levy’s religion, the beneficiaries of his serviceman’s life insurance policy, the address of his next of kin. That would be his parents in New York City. What would it be like when they answered the bell and saw a man in uniform standing in the doorway? Would they know instinctively why he had come? What would he say? How do you tell parents that all the years they had spent raising and educating their son were for nothing? Wasted. In that war, soldier’s slang for death was “wasted.” So-and-so was wasted. It was a good word.

  We finished the reports. I filed them, then transmuted Levy, the corpsman, and the other casualties into numbers. The random arithmetic of war. I had been in Vietnam seven months and had not been scratched. Levy had lasted two weeks. Coming from the colonel’s tent, I saw the swollen, slate-gray clouds building up over the mountains. An image of Levy smiling was in my mind. He was standing with his back against a wall, his hands in his pockets. There was a jukebox next to him. Where had that been? In Georgetown, in Mac’s Pipe and Drum, a bar we went to on weekend liberties, to drink and look at girls and pretend we were still civilians. Five or six of us were there that night. We had picked up some girls, government secretaries—all the girls in Washington seemed to be government secretaries. We danced with them on the small dance floor by the front window. It must have been late autumn, because the window in my memory had steam on it. Levy had not danced. Tall and slim, he was leaning casually against the wall and smiling as we walked back to the table with the girls. There were half-empty pitchers of beer on the table and glasses with foam clinging to their sides. We sat down and filled the glasses, all of us laughing, probably at something Jack Bissell said. Was Bissell there that night? He must have been, because we were all laughing very hard and Bissell was always funny. Still standing, Levy took out his pipe, lit it, and bent down to say something to me. In my memory, I could see his lips moving, but I could not hear him. I could not remember what he said. That was in Georgetown, a long time ago, before Vietnam. I had begun to notice that in myself: I was having a hard time remembering anything that had happened before Vietnam.

  I had always liked Levy and sometimes envied him. He was quietly deliberate, while I was hot-tempered and impulsive. I had a degree from a parochial commuter-college; he had gone to Columbia. His family was well-off; mine had just recently struggled out of the working class. He had had all the advantages, but he had enlisted when he could have easily done something else. I guess he had that, too: a high sense of duty. My own motives for joining the marines had been mostly personal, but Levy seemed to have no personal ambition. He was a patriot—the best sort, the kind who do not walk around with American flags in their lapels. He had volunteered because it had seemed the right thing to do, and he had done it quietly, easily, and naturally. He had one other attribute rare in this indulgent age: an inflexible fidelity to standards. At Quantico, he and I once shared a misadventure. Like me, he had not been an expert map reader. During a difficult land navigation problem, the two of us, following different compass azimuths, ended up lost in the same swamp. It was full of brambles and deep bogs, an evil-looking place where cottonmouths coiled on the branches of the stunted trees. I had been slogging through it for more than an hour, panic rising in me as I plunged out of one thicket and into another. The swamp seemed endless, and there were o
nly a few hours of daylight left. Hacking at the brambles with my bayonet, I heard someone thrashing and cursing a few yards ahead.

  Levy’s face appeared through the undergrowth, thorns hanging from his helmet. He stopped yelling and cursing as soon as he saw me. I was relieved to see someone else, but Levy, who had a reputation for being unflappable, seemed embarrassed that he had been caught in a fit of temper. We decided to stick together until we had worked our way out of the swamp. There was a stream at the edge of it, and beyond the stream, a range of pine-wooded hills. We broke out our maps and tried to figure out where we were. It seemed hopeless. I forded the stream to look for a compass marker that might be tacked to one of the pine trees on the far side. Finding none, I said that I was going to cut across the hills until I came to a road. It meant failing the problem, but that was better than spending the night in those black woods. Levy, however, was not ready to quit. He said he was going to plot a course back to his last compass marker and try to figure out where he had made his mistake. I tried to talk him out of it. To do that, he would have had to retrace his steps through the swamp, which was bad enough in daylight; it would be worse if he got caught in it at night. But he was firm. He was going to do the thing the right way, or at least give it a try. I said, all right, go ahead. He had more grit than I. He went back in. I forded the stream and, after running into another stray, found my way to a road. I also failed the problem.

  So did Levy. Darkness eventually forced him to dead-reckon his way out, as I had done. The next week, he was back in the woods with the rest of us failures, taking the course over. But I had to admire his determination to do the thing as it was supposed to be done. It was typical of him. I think it was that fidelity to standards that killed him. Badly wounded in the legs, he did not have to endanger himself by trying to rescue the corpsman. He could have stayed under cover without any loss of honor, but they had drilled into our heads that a marine never left his wounded exposed to enemy fire. We never left our wounded on the battlefield. We brought them off, out of danger and into safety, even if we had to risk our own lives to do it. That was one of the standards we were expected to uphold. I knew I could not have done what Levy had done. Pulling himself up on his wounded legs, he had tried to save the corpsman, not knowing that the man was beyond saving. And he had probably done it as he had everything else—naturally, and because he thought it was the right thing to do.

  I still could not remember what he had said to me that night in Georgetown. It could not have been important, yet I wanted to remember. I want to remember now, to remember what you said, you, Walter Neville Levy, whose ghost haunts me still. No, it could not have been anything important or profound, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that you were alive then, alive and speaking. And if I could remember what you said, I could make you speak again on this page and perhaps make you seem as alive to others as you still seem to me.

  So much was lost with you, so much talent and intelligence and decency. You were the first from our class of 1964 to die. There were others, but you were the first and more: you embodied the best that was in us. You were a part of us, and a part of us died with you, the small part that was still young, that had not yet grown cynical, grown bitter and old with death. Your courage was an example to us, and whatever the rights or wrongs of the war, nothing can diminish the rightness of what you tried to do. Yours was the greater love. You died for the man you tried to save, and you died pro patria. It was not altogether sweet and fitting, your death, but I’m sure you died believing it was pro patria. You were faithful. Your country is not. As I write this, eleven years after your death, the country for which you died wishes to forget the war in which you died. Its very name is a curse. There are no monuments to its heroes, no statues in small-town squares and city parks, no plaques, nor public wreaths, nor memorials. For plaques and wreaths and memorials are reminders, and they would make it harder for your country to sink into the amnesia for which it longs. It wishes to forget and it has forgotten. But there are a few of us who do remember because of the small things that made us love you—your gestures, the words you spoke, and the way you looked. We loved you for what you were and what you stood for.

  * * *

  Colonel Nickerson said he was having trouble sleeping at night. It was the end of September, and the cause of the colonel’s insomnia were the casualties a company from One-One had suffered during a week-long operation. Out of about one hundred and seventy men, they had lost nearly forty, almost all of them to booby traps and ambush-detonated mines. It would have been a tolerable price if the operation had accomplished something; it had not. The Viet Cong were still there.

  I was chalking up the statistical results when Nickerson told me about his problem.

  “We’re talking too many casualties, lieutenant. I can’t sleep half the time, thinking about those kids.”

  Colonels usually did not make such confessions to lieutenants, so I didn’t know what to tell him. Perhaps he had begun to wonder if we were just wasting lives in Vietnam and wanted someone to tell him otherwise. Perhaps he wanted me to say, “You rest easy, colonel. Those men died in a good cause.” Well, he would have to turn to someone else for that. I had far too many doubts myself.

  But the moody colonel was a completely different man two days later, when a thirty-five-man patrol from A Company was ambushed. It was a typical ambush: the VC set off a Claymore-type mine, sprayed the patrol with automatic-weapons fire, then faded back into the landscape. The action lasted no more than thirty seconds, but fifteen of those thirty-five marines were killed or wounded. Toting up the scoreboard once again, I mentioned to the new executive officer, Lieutenant Colonel Mackle, that if One-One continued taking such casualties, it would cease to exist in about four months. Nickerson walked in just then. He was splattered with mud and had an unlit cigar jammed in his mouth.

  “Now whaddya mean by that, lieutenant?” he asked, and I could tell by his tone that the compassionate officer had given way to the tough, hell-for-leather commander.

  “One-One’s attrition rate, sir,” I said. “If it keeps up, they’ll have one-hundred-percent casualties by February.”

  “Why, I was just over at the hospital,” the colonel said. “I saw those kids from that patrol. They’re still fulla fight, lieutenant.”

  “I wasn’t slandering their courage, sir. I meant they’re taking too many casualties.”

  “Hell, there was this one kid, this Martinez kid. Know what he wants to do?”

  “No, sir.”

  “He wants to get back out there. Get back out there at those goddamned VC. Here, I pulled this out of him.” He waved a piece of shrapnel under my nose, like a second administering smelling salts to a groggy boxer.

  “Hell, fifteen casualties ain’t nothin’,” Nickerson said, walking over to the wall map and tracing the patrol route with a stubby finger. “There’s three thousand men in this regiment.”

  “Right you are, sir, but fifteen casualties is a lot for one platoon.”

  “Is it? When I landed at Guadalcanal, ninety percent of my platoon was wiped out in an hour. There were only five or six of us left, but we kept fighting.”

  “I’m sure you did, sir. My point was…”

  “We kept fighting, goddamnit!” the colonel yelled, and then treated me to a long account of the battle of Guadalcanal, as it was experienced by then-Second Lieutenant Nickerson. When he paused for a breath, I said that I had to get back to work.

  “Well, go ahead then. Get the hell out of here.”

  Fourteen

  In such condition there is … no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

  —Hobbes

  Leviathan

  In late October an enemy battalion attacked one of our helicopter bases, inflicted fifty casualties on the company guarding it, and destroyed or damaged over forty aircraft. Two nights l
ater, another Viet Cong battalion overran an outpost manned by eighty marines from A Company, killing twenty-two and wounding fifty more. The usual ambushes and booby traps claimed daily victims, and the medevac helicopters flew back and forth across the low, dripping skies.

  The regiment’s mood began to match the weather. We were a long way from the despair that afflicted American soldiers in the closing years of the war, but we had also traveled some emotional distance from the cheery confidence of eight months before. The mood was sardonic, fatalistic, and melancholy. I could hear it in our black jokes: “Hey, Bill, you’re going on patrol today. If you get your legs blown off can I have your boots?” I could hear it in the songs we sang. Some were versions of maudlin country-and-western tunes like “Detroit City,” the refrain of which expressed every rifleman’s hope:

  I wanna go home, I wanna go home,

  O I wanna go home.

  Other songs were full of gallows humor. One, “A Belly-full of War,” was a marching song composed by an officer in A Company.

  Oh they taught me how to kill,

  Then they stuck me on this hill,

  I don’t like it anymore.

  For all the monsoon rains

  Have scrambled up my brains,

  I’ve had a belly-full of war.

  Oh the sun is much too hot,

  And I’ve caught jungle rot,

  I don’t like it anymore.

  I’m tired and terrified,

  I just want to stay alive,

  I’ve had a belly-full of war.

  So you can march upon Hanoi,